I certainly hope Watson wins - then WCG gets 500k. What would be really cool is if somehow they could make some sort of distributed computing based supercomputer to do things like this. Workunits wouldn't work, though - not fast enough. Still, if there were some way, it would be awesome to contribute directly to something like this!

ARMONK, N.Y. - 18 Feb 2011: Watson wasn't the only computer system that won this week when it competed successfully against two human champions on the Jeopardy! game show.

The other computing system is called World Community Grid, a virtual supercomputer that helps scientists solve humanitarian challenges by tapping the unused computing power of personal computers around the world. Scientists who use World Community Grid are not only set to receive $500,000 in prize money -- but are already earning unprecedented support worldwide: The day after the tournament's conclusion, World Community Grid saw a 700% spike in the number of people who normally volunteer their computers' spare power for the effort.

World Community Grid, an initiative of the IBM International Foundation, has created the equivalent of one of the world's largest virtual supercomputers designed to tackle projects that benefit humanity, such as new treatments for HIV/AIDS, cancer research, and affordable water purification. World Community Grid works by pooling the unused power of 1.7 million personal computers from 535,000 volunteers in more than 80 countries. It then makes this computational power available for scientists who might not otherwise be able to afford the high speed computing they require for timely research.

World Community Grid users have benefited greatly from this public resource. For instance, Scripps Research Institute tapped World Community Grid to discover two new compounds that can potentially be used to design AIDS-fighting drugs. Individuals donate time on their computers for these and many other humanitarian projects by registering on www.worldcommunitygrid.org, and installing a free, unobtrusive and secure software program on their computers running Microsoft Windows, Macintosh or Linux operating systems.

"Watson's performance on Jeopardy! has captured the imagination of millions of viewers who understand the power of computing to benefit humanity," said Stanley S. Litow, IBM vice president of Corporate Citizenship & Corporate Affairs, and President of IBM's Foundation. "Like Watson, World Community Grid is also a game changer. We're grateful for the skyrocketing interest in World Community Grid as a result of Watson's achievement."

The $500,000 prize money designated for World Community Grid is being sent directly to research scientists heading up projects that use World Community Grid for its speedy computational power. The grants are being allocated based on detailed proposals submitted by the respective project teams.

Additional funding for these initiatives will allow teams to further accelerate their research, test hypotheses and perform the work needed to eventually produce tangible results, such as vaccines and treatments.

One additional grant will be provided to the University of California, Berkeley for its "BOINC operating system" -- software that runs public, volunteer-based computing efforts such as World Community Grid. An additional grant will fund a new project to fight malaria, run by Scripps Research Institute in the United States.

To put its size, power and scope and contributions into perspective, World Community Grid:

* Receives seven computational results from volunteers' PCs every second of the day -- 500,000,000 in all since World Community Grid started six years ago
* Has performed computations for the equivalent of 392,000 years
* Has yielded 31 scientific, peer-reviewed published papers
* Performs computation for projects run by academic and research organizations on nearly every continent
* Consumes only three extra watts of power on the average computer -- less than half used by a seven-watt nightlight
* Performs 400 trillion floating-point operations per second

Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, was built by a team of IBM scientists who set out to accomplish a grand challenge – build a computing system that rivals a human's ability to answer questions posed in natural language with speed, accuracy and confidence. For more information, please visit www.ibmwatson.com.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) has been a leader in corporate social responsibility and corporate citizenship for 100 years. IBM puts initiatives intro place that address vital issues, such as the environment, community economic development, education, health, literacy, language, and culture. To learn more about IBM's corporate citizenship initiatives, please visit: http://www.ibm.com/blogs/citizen-ibm.

We are pleased to inform you that IBMs Watson won the recent Jeopardy! Challenge and are excited that World Community Grid was able to distribute the winnings to organizations that tap World Community Grid for their research projects. For more information, please see the press release.

Social Media:

World Community Grid has enhanced how members may use our website to link their Facebook or Twitter accounts. Just to go our Social Media page to link your World Community Grid account. There are multiple options for what you may want to post. These include:

The Clean Energy Project needs your help. Due to its large file sizes and above-average use of disk operations, we have designated the project as "opt-in". That means that you have to take action to participate. We encourage you to take a look at the system requirements for this project, and determine if your computer is capable of participating. If yes, then give it a try on your computer by going to your My Projects page and selecting The Clean Energy Project - Phase 2. You may learn more about this exciting project here.

On August 12, 2011, you're invited to participate in a live webcast to hear an overview and update on World Community Grid's Discovering Dengue Drugs - Together project. The event will be hosted by Dr. Robert Malmstrom from the The University of Texas Medical Branch.

Since 2007, World Community Grid has had the privilege of supporting the innovative research underway at The University of Texas Medical Branch to advance the discovery of finding a cure for Dengue Fever.

This is the "Discovering Dengue Drugs - Together - Phase 2" project that many of you run every day on your laptops and PCs for World Community Grid, helping us make progress towards identifying promising drug candidates to combat the Dengue, Hepatitis C, West Nile, Yellow Fever, and other related viruses. Though hundreds of thousands are afflicted with these diseases each year, many fatally, there are still no effective treatments.

The webcast will take place on August 12, 2011, starting promptly at 11:00AM Eastern Daylight Time (USA), which is 15:00 Coordinated Universal Time. Please join a few minutes early so that you're sure not to miss anything.

Participants can listen to Dr. Malmstrom while viewing an on-screen presentation. Time permitting, you will be able to ask questions via a text chat interface and Dr. Malmstrom will try to answer them.

And whether or not you can join the webcast, make sure your laptop, PC or Mac is running World Community Grid, and let your friends know this easy way to participate in finding a cure for Dengue Fever!

Thank you,

The World Community Grid Team

P.S. After the webcast we will post the video of the webcast on YouTube, in the World Community Grid News & Update section, and we'll send you a link to the video.

I wandered over the WCG forums tonight. It's been months since I was there last - at least for the purpose of seeing what was shaking on the forums. It looks like there is a problem validating work units. Best guess from one of the CA's is that the problem started around 2100 UTC.

No indication what the problem is or when it will be fixed so if you're checking your results status and see a lot of pending wu's, this is most likely the problem.

Noticed this new project, although didn't see any information on it beforehand. So here's for anyone else that may have missed this. (Extract from WCG Site)

Drug Search for Leishmaniasis

Project Status and Findings:
Information about this project is provided on the web pages below and by the project scientists on the Drug Search for Leishmaniasis website. If you have comments or questions about this project, please visit the Drug Search for Leishmaniasis forum.

Mission
The mission of Drug Search for Leishmaniasis is to identify potential molecule candidates that could possibly be developed into treatments for Leishmaniasis. The extensive computing power of World Community Grid will be used to perform computer simulations of the interactions between millions of chemical compounds and certain target proteins. This will help find the most promising compounds that may lead to effective treatments for the disease.

Significance
Leishmaniasis is one of the most neglected tropical diseases in the world. Each year this disease infects more than two million people in 97 countries. To date, there are no available vaccines to prevent the disease, in spite of multiple research efforts. Leishmaniasis is caused by a protozoan parasite (genus Leishmania) transmitted between human and animal hosts by female sand flies. One form of the disease, the "visceral" form caused by Leishmania infantum in America, mainly affects children, who can die if adequate treatment is not provided promptly. Existing control measures rely upon drug therapy, insect control and education in the affected communities. However, the number of human cases continues to increase in tropical countries such as Bangladesh, India, Sudan, Ethiopia, Brazil, Colombia, Peru and many others.

The classical treatments for all forms of Leishmaniasis can cause severe side effects, including death. Furthermore, drug resistant parasites are causing major problems in many endemic countries. For these reasons, there is an urgent need for new, safe and inexpensive anti-Leishmania drug compounds.

Approach
A software program called VINA from The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, will be used to perform the virtual chemistry experiments. These virtual experiments will search to find which of millions of drug compounds might be able to disable particular proteins, essential for the parasite's survival. Screening for the best potential drug compounds is an early step in the process of developing effective treatments for the disease. With enough computing power, this screening can be done much more quickly than using conventional laboratory experiments. However, existing computer facilities available to the researchers would require approximately 120 years to perform the screening. The power of World Community Grid can reduce the time required to less than one year. Information about the best candidate compounds will be published by the scientists, and this information will be available in the public domain for other scientists to build upon with their research. Further laboratory work using the best candidates identified by this project could lead to the development of better drugs to fight Leishmaniasis.

You are invited to participate in a live webcast on Octover 21, 2011 to hear an overview and update on World Community Grid's Human Proteome Folding project. The event will be hosted by Dr. Richard Bonneau from New York University.

Since 2006, World Community Grid has had the privilege of supporting the innovative research underway at New York University to use computers to predict the structure of proteins, the "molecular machines" of the human body. Knowing protein structure is a critical step in advancing the understanding of how proteins affect human health, providing scientists with the information they need to develop new cures for human diseases.

This is the "Human Proteome Folding - Phase 2" project that many of you run every day on your laptops and PCs for World Community Grid, helping us make progress towards aiding researchers in understanding how proteins perform their intended functions and also how diseases prevent proteins from maintaining healthy cells.

The webcast will take place on October 21, 2011, starting promptly at 11:00AM Eastern Daylight Time (USA), which is 15:00 Coordinated Universal Time. Please join a few minutes early so that you're sure not to miss anything.

Participants can listen to Dr. Bonneau while viewing an on-screen presentation. Time permitting, you will be able to ask Dr. Bonneau questions via a text chat interface.

And whether or not you can join the webcast, make sure your laptop, PC or Mac is running World Community Grid, and let your friends know this easy way to participate in helping humanity!

Also, please note that World Community Grid has added three new download servers to help support our additional growth. Download servers are used to send work to your computer. As a result of this change, your computer may prompt you to communicate with the IP addresses of these new servers. If you have experienced this, please click on this link for further information: http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread_thread,31492

The September 2011 update to the Help Conquer Cancer project has been posted. In this update, we announce work presented earlier this year at the High-Performance Computing Symposium in Montreal: the development of an OpenCL (GPU) implementation of HCC. This GPU version is currently running in our lab. We are pleased with its performance, and anticipate its eventual launch on the World Community Grid.

Please be patient in the meantime. It will take time. A large-scale launch on a new hardware platform is tricky business for the World Community Grid staff, especially while juggling every other active project and new projects emerging from the pipeline.

Thank you to everyone for your enthusiasm and interest in HCC, and your contribution of CPU cycles that make this and other projects possible.

Should be interesting to see GPU support slowly added to WCG projects. I think this would be worth adding a second lower powered GPU to use exclusively for HCC projects while the more powerful GPU stays on folding- at least for me.

Should be interesting to see GPU support slowly added to WCG projects. I think this would be worth adding a second lower powered GPU to use exclusively for HCC projects while the more powerful GPU stays on folding- at least for me.

Click to expand...

That would be awesome, I do have a lower end GPU here I can add that can do those projects while the higher end folds as you said.

Wasn't sure if it was worth making a new thread so since I posted DSFL here before, thought I'd reuse the same thread. Let's do our thing team

GO Fight Against Malaria

Project Status and Findings:
Information about this project is provided on the web pages below. To comment or ask questions about this project, please submit a post in the GO Fight Against Malaria Forum.

Mission
The mission of the GO Fight Against Malaria project is to discover promising drug candidates that could be developed into new drugs that cure drug resistant forms of malaria. The computing power of World Community Grid will be used to perform computer simulations of the interactions between millions of chemical compounds and certain target proteins, to predict their ability to eliminate malaria. The best compounds will be tested and further developed into possible treatments for the disease.
Significance
Malaria is one of the three deadliest infectious diseases on earth and is caused by parasites that infect both humans and animals. Female mosquitoes spread the disease by biting infected hosts and passing the parasites to other hosts that they bite later. When these parasites replicate themselves in red blood cells (which the parasites use for food), the symptoms of malaria appear. Malaria initially causes fevers and headaches, and in severe cases it leads to comas or death. Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite that causes the deadliest form of malaria, kills more people than any other parasite on the planet. Over 3 billion people are at risk of being infected with malaria.

Although there are many approved drugs that are able to cure malarial infections, multi-drug-resistant mutant "superbugs" exist that are not eliminated by the current drugs. Because new mutant superbugs keep evolving and spreading throughout the world, discovering and developing new types of drugs that can cure infections by these multi-drug-resistant mutant strains of malaria is a significant global health priority.
Approach
Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute of La Jolla, California, U.S.A., will use IBM's World Community Grid to computationally evaluate millions of candidate compounds against different molecular drug targets from the malaria parasite. If these target molecules can be disabled, then patients infected with malaria can potentially be cured. The computations will estimate the ability of the candidate compounds to disable the particular target molecules needed by the malaria parasite to survive and multiply. Particular priority will be given to targets and candidate compounds which could attack the multi-drug-resistant mutant "superbug" strains of the malaria parasite. The power of World Community Grid can reduce to one (1) year what would take at least one hundred (100) years to complete using the resources normally available to the researchers at The Scripps Research Institute. The results computed on World Community Grid will be available in the public domain for all scientists to use and build upon in their research to develop drugs to fight malaria.

Seems Wcg is down til tomorrow guys. Our numbers will be in the toilet for a couple days. Guess I should pay attention more to the home page as I would have loaded up on work. As it looks my systems will be sitting idle by this evening.

Seems Wcg is down til tomorrow guys. Our numbers will be in the toilet for a couple days. Guess I should pay attention more to the home page as I would have loaded up on work. As it looks my systems will be sitting idle by this evening.

Click to expand...

Website says 2pm UTC tomorrow as the completion time for their maintenance (10am Eastern time US I think)

Their Facebook page indicates that they are a little ahead of schedule so that's a good sign.

Seems Wcg is down til tomorrow guys. Our numbers will be in the toilet for a couple days. Guess I should pay attention more to the home page as I would have loaded up on work. As it looks my systems will be sitting idle by this evening.

Click to expand...

Yep I will be totally out of work units by late this after noon or early evening on both of my rigs!

Is there a reason why everyone doesn't set their buffer to something like 4 or 5 days? I have mine set to 4. You can set it up to 10.

If you ever need to do a purge, you just blow out all of the wu's in the queue. They might throttle you for a day or 2, but they'll get over it pretty quickly. I've done it numerous times.

Click to expand...

Thats how I have mine setup too, but I did it because my ISP is pretty unreliable. When I installed my SSD I did have to purge ~3days worth of WUs, but that is the only time I have ever had to abort such a massive amount of tasks